


hinei mah tov

by grainjew



Category: Riddle-Master Trilogy - Patricia A. McKillip
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Sibling Bonding, i love the hed sibs.... and how tristan and raederle pretty much decided they were siblings in Heir, me banging on mckillip's back window: MORE SIBLING CONTENT! MORE SIBLING CONTENT!, this is set like literally five minutes after the very last scene of the series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-01 16:08:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16768438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grainjew/pseuds/grainjew
Summary: At sunset, Tristan finds Raederle and Morgon outside of Akren, resplendent and threadbare, and gives them a crown.





	hinei mah tov

**Author's Note:**

> it's been exactly a year since i posted my very first one piece fic, and i appear to be celebrating by posting...... a fic from a different fandom entirely. um if you haven't read riddle-master please stop reading this fic and read the books first because this is the one series i refuse to _ever_ spoil in any capacity
> 
> in any case all blame for this and the reread that precipitated it goes to the wonderful riddle-master discord server, so you can thank them i guess

Tristan of Hed met the High One and Raederle of An out front of Akren, as the setting sun burned the pinks and whites of her rosebushes into molten fire. It turned Raederle’s hair to fire, too, so that she caught Tristan’s attention first; Tristan dropped the bucket she held, sending turnips scattering all over the ground, and darted over to hug her, bury her face in Raederle’s neck as Raederle kissed the top of her head.

“You were gone for weeks this time,” said Tristan, voice muffled. “Everyone missed you.”

“Hello, Tristan,” murmured Raederle. “How is the construction on that new pigpen coming?”

Tristan pulled away from her and wrinkled her nose, suddenly incensed. “Oh, it’s terrible, Raederle. You didn’t hear because you were at the bottom of the ocean, but—” 

And then she stopped, drawn into silence by a land-heir’s instinct, or a sibling’s instinct, or the simple pull of a fond, familiar, encompassing silence to look a little to the side, a little over Raederle’s shoulder, and to meet Morgon’s eyes. 

He was her brother, familiar as ever, with those dark, curious eyes the color of beer and the wooden walls of Akren, and yet he wasn’t. Eliard had come home from Wind Plain full of stories about the great passage of power, about the High One taking the shape of winds and flattening the battlefield as he drove the Earth-Masters from reach of man, about vesta and wraiths and wizard-power and a solemn gathering of land-rulers around a broken tower. And about their brother, most of all, how remote he seemed in his grief, how powerful and how broken and how Eliard wished he would come home. 

“Morgon,” she whispered, and then untangled herself from Raederle — or Raederle became mist for a moment to let her pass — and threw herself into his arms.

“Tristan,” he said. His touch was light on her for a moment, as though he wasn’t certain she was real, or he was real, and then he was clutching her tightly, clinging like barnacles to a hull or the ancient trees of Isig to the earth. His voice was full of wonder. “It feels like years since I’ve seen you.”

“It’s been at least half of one,” she muttered tartly. She didn’t move, though.

Eventually he loosed his grip with all the slow reluctance of leaves unfurling after spring’s last frost, took her chin and then her shoulders in his hands. “You’ve grown again,” he said.

“You’re still taller than me.”

“Not for long, I think, with the way your legs don’t match the rest of you.” He looked away then, past her shoulder, suddenly thoughtful. She followed his gaze; a breeze corralled the spilled turnips and swept them neatly back into the overturned bucket.

“Morgon,” she sighed, and then tried to form another sentence. But her mind kept getting swept up in swells of implication, great tides and gales of it, so she dropped the thought and said only, “Come inside, it’s getting dark.”

They followed her inside, the two of them, peaceful in their silence. She glanced back at them once when she stopped to pick up the bucket and saw them hand-in-hand, Raderle’s hair the color of embers now and Morgon’s worn clothing blurring in the twilight, the edges of him uncertain until it was impossible to tell where he ended and Hed began. 

That picture of him, indistinguishable from the land and at peace with it, threw her back three years to when they were three siblings together in their grief and he was the Prince of Hed, fading much more simply into all the fields and the houses and the land-law of the island. She lingered a moment, caught in the faint unreality of every riddle answered since then, drawing Morgon away from Hed and finally giving him back, the High One bright with knowledge and northern winds. Then she shook herself out of the strange grief that kept growing roots from her feet to the soil and stood up, and went to open the door.

When they were all inside, Tristan directed Morgon and Raederle up the stairs while she ran to the kitchen to drop off the turnips and put together a platter of cheese and fruit to hold their appetites till Eliard came in for supper. She returned to see Raederle digging Peven's crown out of a drawer in the light of a flame that kindled from her hair and the last edgings of daylight, and floated, smokeless and fuelless, at her side.

“In the spare bed linens is hardly better than under the bed,” noted Morgon, at the click of the door closing.

“And where else should I put it, exactly?” groused Tristan, as Raederle stared at it for a long moment and then handed it to Morgon. “It almost went back under your bed, for lack of space elsewhere.”

He didn't seem to hear her as he weighed the crown in his hands until the center gem started reflecting the browns of his hair and eyes and face. “You polished it,” he said at last, like it was a revelation. “Raederle said it was covered in seaweed and barnacles.”

“Oh, Morgon,” wailed Tristan, and put her face in her hands. “Look at you, in those clothes you don't look to have changed in half a year even with all your power. Of course we polished it. Eliard polished it. In the winter, when Raederle brought it. Why wouldn't we have polished it?”

“I don't know,” said Morgon, somewhat distantly. Tristan looked up to see him staring all puzzled at her, blinking slowly at the crown. “I don't know. I thought maybe— I don't know.”

“Oh, Morgon,” she said again, but softer. She walked over to the motionless statue he made in the room that used to be his own, took the crown from his light grip and handed it to Raederle, wrapped her arms around him again. And then— “Isn't the High One supposed to know everything?”

“I said that too,” noted Raederle dryly, and Tristan muffled into Morgon's shoulder a burst of laughter that could also have been a sob.

“Almost everything,” corrected Morgon gently. “Almost everything. I spent the past months reworking all the bindings I lost when he… I missed a great many things during that time.”

Tristan steadied herself against him, matching his breathing to her own, and felt him resonant with the peace of Hed, familiar and steady, but entwined with it were other things, unfamiliar or prodding at the edges of her memory. A hidden watchfulness that called Lyra to mind, a depth of history that might be from An, bustling scholarship from Caithnard, deep, slow secrets from Isig, the volatility of Ymris and a wildness that could have been Osterland. And a wind, through it all, lawless and yet bound to a an unknowable law, deep and high and encompassing. Disquieted, she pulled back from him, stared at the threadbare weave of his rich tunic instead.

“Tristan?” said Raederle, and Tristan, grateful for the distraction, moved to stare at her instead. She had that peace and that wildness to her too, her masses of hair tangled and the dress of thick, sensible wool Tristan had got made for her weeks ago worn nearly to shreds from weeks under the ocean as — Tristan didn't know — a crab, a dolphin, a petrel, a jellyfish, a flounder, a whale shark, a rippling current, all sorts of shadowed unnamable creatures. There was a clear brightness to her and Morgon both, for all its undergirding of confused grief, like the unyielding heart of a fire or the keening pitch of a wind. 

Tristan shivered, and grimaced, and pressed on her eyes with the heels of her palms. She said, “So, what are you planning on doing with that crown?”

Raederle raised an eyebrow at Morgon, who shut his eyes a moment and rocked back on his heels.

“I suppose I should take it back to Anuin, like I'd originally meant to,” he said eventually.

“I suppose you should,” agreed Tristan. Then she added, with a sudden desperation she couldn't quite source. “But stay the night first. Please, stay the night. Eliard bought a harp, you know. I can't play at all, but he's even worse than me.”

“Shh, Tristan,” Morgon murmured, shaping her name like like he had never been gone, like it had never before been said. He touched fingertips to her cheek.

“Come harp for us,” she begged. “Stay awhile. I know you'll go eventually, I know you have so many names now, ancient and powerful and breathtaking names, but you're still our brother. Maybe you're not Morgon of Hed anymore, but you're still— you're still our brother. Teach me and Eliard to harp, or eat with us, or— or something. I promise. I promise, you can always come home to Hed.”

“I'll stay,” he said haltingly, and in the dusklight Tristan couldn’t tell if he was crying. “I’ve come home for a little while. I'll stay, little sister.”

And they stood like that as the light faded around them, until Eliard opened the door and it was time for supper.

**Author's Note:**

> cries i love these books so much


End file.
